06-30-2009, 12:54 AM

Alright. Right now, I have my macs set up, and my to-be main desktop (which i will get OSX running on when i have the time) is just used for downloading torrents and such, as it is more powerful. I have two eternal drives, one for transferring files between computers and one for Time Machine. The Time Machine drive is formatted as Apple Journaled and, therefore, cannot be used with the PC.
The other drive was formatted as FAT32, which works with both Macs and PC's, but FAT32 drives, being terrible, can only transfer 5gb files at a time, and I regularly have to transfer much larger files, so I kept having to split files into two or three RAR archives. To solve the problem, I formatted the drive as NTFS, which can transfer any filesize, but I've now found out that NTFS drives are read-only on a mac. So, what should I do? NTFS is read only, FAT/FAT32 can only transfer 5gb- files and Apple Journaled doesn't work with PC's. I cannot waste my dual layer DVD's every time I need to do a file transfer, so what format should I use in order to transfer 5gb+ files between Macs AND PC's?
-thx
-wman

06-30-2009, 01:01 AM

I was reading around and apparently if I use normal mac formattin, but do NOT journal, it will work. true? backing up to test, but it it will take a while.

Well I found a third-party NTFS driver for Mac OS and Linux (yay) called NTFS 3g. So no more problem. thx anyways

06-30-2009, 08:32 AM

FYI: The limit is actually 4GB with FAT32.


You've found the free one already. There is also Paragon's NTFS for Mac, not free, but provides reading and writing to NTFS drives and also now comes with a Windows app that allows access to HFS partitions from Windows.